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Writing the Journey: June 1999

"The Futures of Travel Writing"


Patrick Holland, The University of Guelph
pholland@arts.uoguelph.ca

While travel writing in all its forms -- travel guides, travelogues and anthologies, travel supplments in newspapers, travel texts on the world wide web, etc. -- proliferates exponentially, some recent commentary is marked by a rhetoric of exhaustion and distaste; travelers carry a baggage of arrogance, tourists trample sensitive environments, and authentic destinations recede. Travel writing, it is suggested, is reprehensible in its insensitivity, obsolete and, in the age of globalization and virtuality, redundant. Such commentary, however, hardly indicates that travel writing, much less travel, are under serious threat, for travel writing has flourished precisely under the sign of disappearance: the lost, the last, the depleted. Granted, then, that travel writing does "have a future," it is worthwhile exploring this future in the context of new forms of global consciousness. This paper suggests one model for interrogating postmodern and global narratives of travel: a model of boundary blurring and gap closing. Travel writing has, or course, always thrived on a blurring of genres, but current trends call much more than genre into question. Skepticism about the stability of such categories as the epistemological and the ontological, for example, has already produced motivated experimentation -- boundary blurring and gap closing -- on several levels.

This paper addresses the process under four headings:

  1. The travel guide is less easily differentiated from -- and subordinate to -- the travelogue. Exemplifying this phenomenon is the Lonely Planet industry, which increasingly collapses the distinction between guide, narrative, and virtual travel, by promoting travel across available media.
  2. The distinction between the travelogue as record of actualized journey and the "novel" as imagined journey is extinguished in postmodern fictions that thrive on confessional and journalistic modes. William T. Vollman's The Atlas (1996) exemplifies this trend, as do the may of the shorter pieces appearing in the journal Granta.
  3. Ethnography has responded to the recognition of its proximity to the protocols and freedoms of travel writing by exploiting its own relativity and vulnerability. Richarad Price and Sally Price in Equatoria (1992) -- an example of the new ethnography -- juxtapose an account of their own journeys and investigations with a melange of ethnographic/travel fragments.
  4. Travel -- as actual practice, as a mode of being in the world, as a metaphor -- is increasingly mediated as a virtual experience, accessed as readily -- if not more readily -- in virtual modes than through physical or conventional textual contact; similarly, actual destinations evolve into paradigmantic spatial configurations (see Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities).

Relevant for all of the above is the explosion of commentary and theory on travel writing that occurred a decade ago, and that encompasses other forms of boundary crossing and gap closing within the larger elision of travel writing in the proliferation of traveling theory; theory, that is, as yet another form of virtuality.


Patrick Holland
School of Literatures and Performance
Studies in English
The University of Guelph
Guelph, Ontario, Canada NIG 2W1

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Updated May 23, 1999